Microsoft Did The Impossible By Making An App That Describes The World To Blind People

While you may love your Snapchats and your Instagrams, Microsoft has released an app that is meant to help blind people. The app uses a smartphone's camera and narrates the world it sees through the lens for the blind and visually impaired.

The app is called Seeing AI, and it is free to download from the App Store for iOS devices. The app can identify people, facial expressions, describe a scene, recognise currency and also read text.

When the app reads the text, Seeing AI can tell users to place a document in front of the camera. Once placed, the App will confirm and scan the document and read out the text. It can even scan bar codes and speak out additional information about products.

The Seeing Ai can also pull up images from other apps to identify it and describe images. For example, the app can identify images on Twitter and describe the scene to the blind user. The App is currently available to download in India, US, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, but will be coming to more countries.The project was demonstrated in March last year by Microsoft software engineer Saqib Shaikh.

Shaikh, who lost his sight at the age of seven, said last year: "I teamed up with like-minded engineers to make an app which lets you know who and what is around you ... years ago this was science fiction. I never thought it would be something you can actually do, but artificial intelligence is improving at an ever faster rate and I am excited to see where this can go.”

Smartphones already have features inbuilt that aid the visually impaired where voice assistants or Apple's VoiceOver screen reader tells users what is on the screen and guide them in tapping the correct area of the screen.